When I first saw the trailer for this movie, my immediate reaction was “Ashton Kutcher? Seriously?”

Having seen the movie now, I don’t think Kutcher was a bad choice to play Jobs. Physically he bears a strong resemblance to Jobs and he does a fair job with makeup pulling off the illusion of being Jobs. Except for one thing I’ll mention here and try to overlook for the rest of this review. Starting about 1/3 into the movie, Kutcher adopts a very awkward gait while walking. He sort of hunches his shoulders over, leans forward and splays his legs out as he walks. The result is decidedly uncomfortable looking, and on several occasions it feels like Kutcher is focused more on achieving this strange gait than on the scene around him.

I was mostly curious about this movie because of my close association with Apple back in the 80s. I was, back then, a certified Macintosh developer and attended multiple Apple Developer conferences and other Apple events including some of the events where Steve Jobs was the keynote speaker. I had even met some of the people in the movie, albeit very briefly and only in the context of being part of a group attending a workshop or mingling during meals, between sessions or during some of the “get to know Apple” activities.

People who knew me at that time will remember that I did not have a high opinion of Steve Jobs, and my opinion of him has not really changed that much since then, although I give him more credit for his marketing savvy and ability to spot a trend-setting market opportunity than I did then. Back then I more or less considered Steve Wozniak to be the real genius behind the creation and success of Apple Computer, and meeting Woz was much higher on my “want to do” list than meeting Jobs. Although I never actually met either of them in spite of being in several sessions where one or the other (or both) spoke.

My main curiosity in watching the movie was how well the movie would match my own memories of the time, particularly around the creation and production of the Lisa and the Macintosh computers.

As it turns out the movie was much more of a character portrait than any sort of historically meaningful life story. What historically relevant information there was, and there was very little, was mostly focused on the iconic imagery of Jobs, Woz and Apple. The humble beginnings in Jobs parent’s garage, the production of the first kit computer (now known as the Apple I), the creation of the Apple II, etc. There was virtually no meaningful technological history. For example, there was no mention of Jobs visiting Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Corporation (which is where most of the technology that made the Mac so visionary had been produced) or any real exploration whatsoever of what made the Apple II any better than the dozens of competing computers set up in booths beside Apple’s introduction of the Apple II.

Anyway, the movie was all about what sort of person Jobs was, and how he grew, or didn’t grow. I suppose the point was to try to show how visionaries are different than normal people. But what emerged was not so much a comparison of visionaries vs normal folks as a comparison of assholes vs geeks vs corporate greedheads. Unfortunately the characters other than Jobs mostly fit some one-dimensional caricature, including, amazingly, major figures like Steve Wozniak who came across as a fairly typical overweight, socially awkward, business ignorant engineer. I’ve never met Woz personally, but I’ve been present in the room several times when he was presenting and I’ve seen tons of interviews with him and that is a seriously unfair representation of a pretty complex and interesting individual.

There is a certain amount of irony in a movie that portrays the single greatest failing of Steve Jobs to have been his singular focus on his own needs, desires and goals to the detriment of everyone around him, and then treats every other character in the movie as a cardboard, meaningless drone who exists for no other purpose than to be a cog in the Steve Jobs machine. In fact the depiction of the other characters is so limited that there’s really no point in critiquing them. Sure I could snark about how awful the members of the Board of Directors were portrayed, particularly the Farmers Insurance guy playing the “bad guy” board member with the subtlety of a careening Mack truck, but that’s the sort of depiction that was needed to allow the movie to be all about Steve Jobs.

Which begs the question of how does the Steve Jobs of the movie actually come out? Well, the Cosmic Wife’s reaction was “what a total jerk!” Which is pretty accurate as far as my understanding of Steve Jobs is. The movie is sometimes surprisingly unsympathetic to Jobs, especially in any scene where Jobs has to interact with anyone outside of creating a product for Apple. You end up wondering if Steve actually remembers his wife’s name.

Since the movie offered no real insight into what made Jobs successful, other than that he was a driven jerk, and it offered no real context for how Apple became the technology juggernaut it was in the early 80s and has become again with the iPhone and iPod, I really can’t recommend the movie as a way to spend a few hours, especially at movie theater prices. I’d give it 1.5 misaligned circuit boards out of 5 and say wait until it’s on the Lifetime channel on a rainy Sunday afternoon if you want to see it.

If it is based on an actual biography, and the biography is as vague and inaccurate around the historical facts as this movie is, then it’s a pretty crappy biography.

Just one example. Jobs and Wozniak were not the only “founders” of Apple computer. There was another dude who was also a joint owner, Jobs, Woz and the other guy each owned 1/3 of the company when they started making circuit boards. For whatever reason the third guy sold his portion of the company back to Jobs and Woz for, I think, a few thousand dollars.

The visit to PARC is not merely a technical background element of the Jobs story. It is one of the most critical moments in the development of the Lisa/Mac user interface. Leaving that out of a “biography” would be comparable to leaving out of Henry Ford’s biography any mention of how Ford came up with the idea of mass production. Not to mention it’s just plain unfair to the people at PARC who did the actual work Jobs stole borrowed.

And those are just some very basic things. Jobs made probably two to three times as much money from his Pixar deal than he did from Apple, and it was Pixar that really brought Jobs back from the scrapheap of failed CEOs. Yet Pixar was not even mentioned in the movie. Then there’s the Next situation which was the supposed reason Amelio brought Jobs back, Apple had failed to successfully develop and release their “Copeland” OS and the result was devastating to their product release strategy since Windows 3.0 had finally fixed most of the flaws of earlier versions of Windows. It was “NextStep” the Next OS that became the core of the Mac’s very successful OS X, and that was the first major success Jobs had back at Apple.

Anyway, there was so much left out, so much dramatized beyond historical accuracy and so much flat out wrong that this movie can hardly be called a “biography”. So if it was based on a book, either that book was equally bad, or else the movie did not do the book justice.

Dadman said,

in August 29th, 2013 at 9:56 am

I did alittle sleuthing and this film is not based on Isaacson’s biography which I read by the way, and it does includes all of the elements you mention above. Another Jobs film is in the works apparently written/produced by Aaron Sorkin, the same guy who did The Social Network. Maybe Sorkin’s production will be better.

Nope. I’m getting my son settled into college this week and have been very busy. I do want to see it and may get a chance this weekend. Sorkin’s film is going to be based on Isaacson’s biography evidently…

Foobarista said,

in August 30th, 2013 at 2:20 am

The irony with Next is that the massive price Apple paid for it was seen as a huge bribe to get Steve back. NextStep was nice too, and proved to be very important – probably saved Apple as their “Taligent” and (as you mentioned) “Copeland” attempts at new OSes all crashed & burned – but not many people realized it at the time.

I have a friend who had worked at NeXT, who was basically waiting for his stock to become officially worthless so he could write it off. Apple bought Next, and his stock was converted to Apple stock for an unbelievable factor. He sold it immediately (which was a good move, as getting Steve back was seen as a Hail Mary play by a desperate company at the time), but has always kicked himself as it would be worth about 50x now.

Foo, one of my early lessons in what I call “Cosmeconomics” was with Apple Computer (and then Intel). During the heyday of the day-trader back in the late 90s I was issued some stock options that had a three year conversion time limit or something like that. When they vested and I had to either buy the stock or cash them in, I cashed them in and ended up with several thousand dollars in a sort of windfall.

So, being an Apple fan at the time, I invested in Apple stock, which at the time was hovering around the $25 or so mark (my memory is not to be trusted here). As soon as I invested Apple stock started a steady march south, ending up around $18 as I recall, and I eventually got fed up with watching my investment rot into nothing. This would have been around 2001 or so, I think. So I sold that off and put it in what I thought was a much more stable stock. Intel. As it happened I made the transaction overnight and had to get on an airplane for a business trip the next morning. Then after working all day I finally got back to the hotel to check on my new Intel stock and the stock had LITERALLY dropped 40% in ONE DAY. THE DAY I invested in it.

That pretty much turned my windfall into just about enough cash to pay for some minor home repairs so I cashed out and have not directly purchased stock since then, mostly because I would feel terrible about driving another stock into absolute destruction, wiping out additional billions of investor value.

So I stick with money market funds or similar investments now that don’t affect a single stock.

So does that mean I’m responsible for the worldwide economic crash of 2008?